Shadow

for Chamber Orchestra

Stacy Garrop

Quick Overview

"Shadow" is a chronicle of my stay at Yaddo (an artist colony in New York) in the summer of 2001. Upon arriving, I met several visual artists and photographers whose work sparked my imagination; one particular artist used ordinary safety pins to create wall hangings and tree snakes; a painter studied a scene of nature and then painted it from memory so the end results would contain bright blues and pinks and greens not in nature?s original. Since I wanted to compose in a new way to break out of my own old methods, I spent a lot of time taking photographs of particular items (specifically a statue?s reflection in the ripples of a fountain and small parts of stained glass windows) to try to jog my mind into a new direction. These pictures, when pieced together on my studio wall, formed a collage of jagged bits of color and motion that were unified by their basic elements. To me, this suggested overlapping lines of counterpoint, shifting textures (including water ripple sounds), and the need to write the piece out of order. Parts of the piece got developed for a month or two, then a part that comes earlier in the piece would be worked out, then I would skip ahead to what I thought would be the end, and then go back to parts that had already been developed and pull the music further along.

The actual title is derived from a Yaddo story. Over a century ago, the Trask family had bought the property that would later become Yaddo. When Mrs. Trask asked her four-year-old daughter what they should name the place, she replied ?Yaddo,? because it rhymes with ?shadow.? To the little girl, the word shadow represented death. Death constantly surrounded the Trask family, and ultimately the Trasks lost all four of their children during infancy or early childhood. As death surrounds us in unexpected ways throughout our lives, I could not escape learning of the demise of someone I knew while at Yaddo. This experience shaded what I had originally planned to be a light, colorful work into something much darker.